I'm looking to upgrade my full RAID 5 3x3TB, RAID 5 3x2TB into one single 6x4TB RAID 6.changing it to a 3x3TB + 1x4TB RAID 5 until the 4TB WD40EFRX come out, swap out with the reds.but if the 639 will support the WD50EFRX... I would love 6x5TB...

revaaron wrote:...but if the 639 will support the WD50EFRX... I would love 6x5TB...

Are you asking if unknown future products will be supported? Pretty impossible for anybody to answer (even Qnap) until said products exist and can be tested. Rest assured though that Qnap will get test samples of the WD40EFRX/WD50EFRX in advance of when the products are generally available.

An educated guess is that they will be supported but with whatever limitations still exist in the firmware by then.

Today for example, you can't expand a RAID volume past the 16 TB. As explained in Note 11 of the Qnap compatibility list, larger volumes are supported but can't be expanded or have disks added (replacing disks of course works). This limitiation may or may not be a showstopper to you, depending on how you plan to do your upgrade.

RAID have never ever been a replacement for backups. Without backups on a different system (preferably placed at another site) you will eventually lose data!

All data storage consists of both the primary storage and the backups. It's your money and your data, spend the money wisely or pay with your data!

revaaron wrote:...but if the 639 will support the WD50EFRX... I would love 6x5TB...

Are you asking if unknown future products will be supported? Pretty impossible for anybody to answer (even Qnap) until said products exist and can be tested. Rest assured though that Qnap will get test samples of the WD40EFRX/WD50EFRX in advance of when the products are generally available.

An educated guess is that they will be supported but with whatever limitations still exist in the firmware by then.

Today for example, you can't expand a RAID volume past the 16 TB. As explained in Note 11 of the Qnap compatibility list, larger volumes are supported but can't be expanded or have disks added (replacing disks of course works). This limitiation may or may not be a showstopper to you, depending on how you plan to do your upgrade.

There is FW and there is hardware. I have a bunch of old RAID controllers that can't support drives over 2TB. My little drobo can't do over 4TB drives so 5TB in that are out of the question. But if I will be able to start with 5TB... hm...

revaaron wrote:I have a bunch of old RAID controllers that can't support drives over 2TB. My little drobo can't do over 4TB drives so 5TB in that are out of the question. But if I will be able to start with 5TB... hm...

From what we know today, the TS-x39 Pro series (going into year five now) can deal with large drives - and unless there is something strange, even larger HDD are within the reach for the hardware.

As you say ... there is also firmware. Dealing with storage volumes > 16 TB requires 64 bit instruction set, which is not available on the Intel Atom N270. So we're back to the hardware again. This prohibits using a file system larger than 16 TB ... making your 6 * 5 TB RAID5 (or RAID6) obsolete.

The same applies to all current 32 bit ARM core based NAS models, too.

revaaron wrote:There is FW and there is hardware. I have a bunch of old RAID controllers that can't support drives over 2TB.

this was problem of using 512B sectors most drivesuse and 32-bit addressing that can't address more than 4294967295 sectors (which is 2TB-512B). I'm not sure what the next limit is, but I don't think it will be near.From DOS times, I remember limits of 512MB, 8GB and 32GB.

revaaron wrote:My little drobo can't do over 4TB drives so 5TB in that are out of the question. But if I will be able to start with 5TB... hm...

Which drobo? Are you sure it does not support over 4TB? When searching for this, I haven't seen anything about such limit.

experience with administration of UN*X (mostly linux) and applications on internet servers since 1994...

fantomas wrote:Which drobo? Are you sure it does not support over 4TB? When searching for this, I haven't seen anything about such limit.

you know what... I never thought about it.. I have the Drobo 4-bay second gen. When I originally configured it, I could only format it in seconds that added up to 16TB. I originally have 2 8TB Shares and then when I re-did the whole thing, I was only able to make a maximum of 1 16TB share (after they upgraded to ext4 internally), but I never tried to make it 2 16TB with apportionment of actually TBs to the different virtual partitions. IDK if that would be possible and looking at the current drobo dashboard, I don't know how I would even try that.

revaaron wrote:I'm looking to upgrade my full RAID 5 3x3TB, RAID 5 3x2TB into one single 6x4TB RAID 6.changing it to a 3x3TB + 1x4TB RAID 5 until the 4TB WD40EFRX come out, swap out with the reds.but if the 639 will support the WD50EFRX... I would love 6x5TB...

There is possibility to configure 6x4TB as RAID5 (~20TB) or RAID6 (~16TB). It's quite possible that you will be able to do the same with 5TB disks.

You can migrate existing RAID up to 16TB capacity, so you can now replace disks and expand any RAID up to the 16TB capacity.

Currently you can not expand existing >16TB RAID, this might be possible in the future.

It is not possible to expand already existing RAID to >16TB capacity, due to limits on present RAIDs, which means it won't be possible in the future.

It's possible that in the future you will be able to expand RAID over 16TB, maybe even those that will be created <16TB.

revaaron wrote:

fantomas wrote:Which drobo? Are you sure it does not support over 4TB? When searching for this, I haven't seen anything about such limit.

you know what... I never thought about it.. I have the Drobo 4-bay second gen. When I originally configured it, I could only format it in seconds that added up to 16TB. I originally have 2 8TB Shares and then when I re-did the whole thing, I was only able to make a maximum of 1 16TB share (after they upgraded to ext4 internally), but I never tried to make it 2 16TB with apportionment of actually TBs to the different virtual partitions. IDK if that would be possible and looking at the current drobo dashboard, I don't know how I would even try that.

OK, we will leave this to DROBO. in fact, DROBO can have its own RAID levels with its own limits and they do not care about the filesystem (which AFAIK causes the 16TB the limit on QNAP)

experience with administration of UN*X (mostly linux) and applications on internet servers since 1994...